as I’ve aged—and I hope matured some, my thinking regarding all this has shifted. You’ve likely heard the joke about meeting St. Peter (another favorite) in heaven who cautions to speak quietly because that group over there thinks they are the only ones here.

We got her back to bed and called her doctor who said to bring her in first thing.  Having grown up with all boys I was dumb as dirt about pregnancy, periods and such.  Is THIS what pregnant women do? She passed out one more time before we got her to his office around 8 o'clock. 

during one of her speaking visits to Nashville shortly after my mom had passed that she overheard someone asking me about mom. Barb broke in and said: “Well, since your mom has passed and you’re very close to Tim’s age, we should just adopt each other”.

if you did not get things right with God right now, you’d step out the door of the church that night, be hit by ‘that bus’ and ushered into eternal doom and damnation.  So, it made sense to me to go to the altar, get right, and then run in front of the bus!  Pretty fatalistic huh? But I seriously thought that.

I’d even tried drinking some of the hideous homeopathic cures he had tried. And here comes ‘Johnny come lately’ trying to rally our ‘oh, ye of little faith crowd’. Again, I want to knock him from the fifth floor window. Jeff did die that evening.

I’m just sayin’, to have lived a life as a social worker, serving those troubled by multiple situations in their lives, working with those others saw as misfits…or worse, as scum and human trash—took something out of me…but it gave me more.

God's original intent was that the world would sparkle every day...that it would glisten and shine like stained glass windows, crystal bowls and kaleidoscopes.  The grand truth is, the world still does, if you can 'see' it.  And I got the gift of seeing it all through watery eyes...which makes it even more beautiful. 

he emphatically said “take that child you’ve met out for a good time and get reacquainted”.  He knew that part of me thought the whole inner child theory stuff was silly but could see that I had serious concerns for the weekend.  I had always blown off all the inner child talk. 

We, like all bikers, started out on the bikes we'd had (not the one with chrome fenders), but quickly began ratcheting up to better, lighter and more well equipped bikes. I loved it! The previous trips of a few miles became Saturday rides of 60-75 miles.

I’d read the history of how the English treated the Emerald Isle.  They were nasty during the years of what was called the potato famine. It was really a form of genocide.  So, I’d been to Ireland more than once, never England.

We were able to see sections of the trail from the boat particularly one section that traversed the barren slope of the Manono Ridge. From the sea, it looked treacherous as hikers inched along the narrow path on the cliff a couple of hundred feet above the ocean at times meeting another hiker going the opposite direction having to hug each other as they passed.

I’ve returned to Ghost Ranch several times since then because the very location…has become holy to me. When I get within a few miles of the ranch I can feel the stirrings of those five days begin to come over me yet again. The Celtic peoples call those places ‘thin places’, where the barrier between this world and the next is lean.

Besides memories of the beautiful home I was staying in, my thoughts have often gone back to Pu’uhonua o Honaunau…that place of refuge. If the Hawaiian’s could make it to the pu‘uhonua, they in a sense got a “get out of jail free” card, and often literally got their lives back.

I’ve never hiked the loop without getting lost for a while. Obviously, we ultimately found our way since I’m here to tell you about it. Like our lives, you have to be lost first, before you are found.

It was over one of those cream puffs that I met Carol Gritton for the first time. Carol had been sent from denominational headquarters to cover the meeting. Following the conference Carol and I maintained sporadic contact. A few months later Carol called to tell me that she’d just learned that her own brother, Clarke was HIV+.

Is there a set path in our genes to be followed or as I was taught, to find the will of God for your life, as if there was a specific plan. Back then I feared that in failing to find that plan it would be like a NASA launch to the moon

I've been a lap swimmer since my late twenties. Just before I decided to get into lap swimming many of us at First Nazarene got into what a physiologist, also at the church, dubbed 'temple conditioning'...mostly around becoming a runner.

All of this to say, many of us have these thoughts of being on the outside. I am far from alone as it turns out. Yet Maya Angelou’s statement is profound. The reward is great even though the comrades along the way get fewer.

In our world of 24-hour news, multiple platforms and social media that stream the tragedies and traumas from around the world into our faces via smart-TVs, all our screens and our phones, how are we to cope? How do we begin to deal with it?